Climate Change All Change - Eco-food co-design
The Pitch
Problem statement
Climate Change All Change (CCAC) brings professional designers into underserved state primary schools to work with children on creative solutions to the climate crisis. Our 6-week programme delivers essential climate science and design instruction to offset shortfalls in DT teaching and address climate anxiety in the young. Children conceive an aspect of life that is familiar to them, for example housing, and imagine how to adapt it to life in 2050. Each programme ends with a public display of the children’s work. The children learn through design and modelling, using a range of craft and professional materials. Unfortunately, the schools do not have the cash to provide these essentials.
Solution
Next year we are running our programme at London Fields Primary School. The project will show children how to design an appropriate setting for food production and cultivation, preparation and eating in an imagined urban setting in 2050. This includes concepts for future kitchen and dining. The children learn and develop their ideas using a range of items such as modelling materials and plant propagation packs (these are summarised below). Producing, preparing and presenting adequate healthy sustainable food, during challenging times, is a fundamental need. The ability to grow and cultivate food – even in cities – is an important and eye-opening skill for urban children.
Why are we best placed to deliver?
CCAC has been working in this area since 2020, launching our first programme in schools in 2021. We offer focused, high-quality programmes to underserved schools. We understand how to meet DT and climate science needs in the primary sector, while also going one step further and opening up a future world of work in an exciting, growing sector, to young, developing minds. We are aspirational. We push ourselves to deliver gold-standard programmes to the state sector. We have recently relaunched our website and updated our teaching resources. We have appointed an educational monitor to ensure that we hit all the right pedagogical targets in our programmes.
Focus Areas
Delivery plan
Budget breakdown
| £2,000 will allow London Fields Primary School to buy the necessary materials for a CCAC project. Large-scale graphic materials and physical modelling items for 60 students | £300 |
| Plants and planting materials. This includes plant propagation packs – see illustration below – 6 sets | £800 |
| Food preparation and consumption items for 20 groups of three. Biophilic guest speaker props and materials | £900 |
Beneficiaries
560 people
Who will benefit
Expected impact
CCAC’s sustainable food programme aims to arm primary-age children with the knowledge and skills to grow edible plants on a small-scale in an urban environment, while introducing them to design settings for food preparation and eating which mitigate and transcend the worst impacts of climate change. This will be CCAC’s first food production and consumption project. If successful it will be repeated in a variety of forms within our current Expansion Programme involving approximately four further schools. We will then look to take the model further when CCAC expands across the UK. The project involves guest contributors operating from a broad eco food network into which the results of the co-design will be fed. Imagining Tomorrow, a free Young V&A exhibition, running for 9 months and showcasing CCAC’s work, opens in February 2025. It provides a great opportunity for broadcasting CCAC’s work, its sponsors, and the outcomes of this project.
Track record
A full description of the charity, its work and achievements can be found on our website. A team from Kings College London monitored and evaluated our 2022 Programme with very encouraging results and helpful recommendations. It provided strong evidence that the projects: • Increase climate literacy understanding and the key function of design • Demonstrate the benefit of creative, problem-solving working • Reduce children’s anxiety/anger at the effects of climate change on the world they will inherit by developing their sense of agency and purpose • Allow children to experience the positive value of teamwork • Redress a decade’s 71% decline in school uptake of design and technology • Support teachers to engage with climate science and the design economy • Develop children’s presentation skills On the strength of the 2023 Demonstration Programme we have now commenced our four-year Expansion Programme